Not Quite the Same as Stalking
by Bekkoni
Summary: Superman finds a rather...disturbing file of Batman's and decides to intervene. Which is never the best of ideas. BM/WW, One-Shot


A/N: Hi, all. For some reason (technical conundrums) this story's text was replaced with an old document from the doc manager for a few days before I noticed it. Sorry for the weirdness.

~Not Quite the Same as Stalking~

Batman was in his third hour of monitor duty, which was usually around the time that even he started running out of things to do. Even the most psychotic of the supervillains seemed to be taking the day off. There wasn't even a forest fire or a minor tectonic shift to keep an eye on. So he was almost glad when he heard the doors open behind him with a hiss of compressed air.

Until he realized that it was Clark, wearing the furrowed-brow, thin-lipped expression that he usually had after Bruce did something that he "had qualms about" or "wanted to discuss." It was no secret that their methods were substantially…different, to say the least. Bruce just wished that for once Clark could admit that sometimes breaking a few bones worked.

He was mildly surprised when Clark tossed a thick manila file down on the desk and snapped, "Do you know what that is?"

"It appears to be an office file. One of mine, actually." Bruce sighed inwardly. "Something wrong, Superman?"

"Remember how you told me to get the mission reports out of your desk?" Clark asked, in a tone that was deliberately nonchalant. Bruce kept one eye on the monitors and debated which would happen first: some interesting calamity or Clark getting to the fucking point. "Well _this_ was in the drawer."

Bruce opened up the file, flipped through the first couple of pages, and then handed it back to Clark. "This was in the left-hand drawer. I quite clearly told you to go in the right-hand drawer. There's your problem."

"I _found_ the mission reports," Clark said, with an edge to his voice that made Bruce's hand wander towards the pocket on his belt that held the kryptonite. "But I also saw what was in this folder. And Bruce—this is disturbing."

Batman raised an eyebrow, but as he had no clue what Clark was going on about, all he could do was ask the obvious. "Why?"

Clark took a deep breath, like he was planning for them to have a squishy heart-to-heart, and sat down in the other monitor chair, his hands folded on his lap. Good lord. Bruce was regretting not taking up Vicki Vale's invitation to the Gotham Charity Ball now. "Diana broke up with you three months ago."

"I'm aware," Bruce replied. "It was about time she realized I wasn't going to marry her."

Clark opened up the folder. On top was a picture of Diana, exiting the UN headquarters. The angle—high up and blurry from the zoom—showed that it had been taken from atop a nearby skyscraper. The next page was another picture of Diana, this time with a blond man, seated together at a café table. Bruce had gotten that one off of a security camera, as he'd been busy tracking down the Joker at the time.

"I haven't looked at the stuff in the back," Clark said. "Please don't tell me you have pictures of them in bed together."

"She's only been dating him a few weeks, Diana doesn't jump into the sheets with them that quick." Bruce glanced back at the screens for a minute—he'd thought for an instant that he'd seen a hurricane alert; maybe they'd have to send out some groups to do damage control. But no such luck, it was just a false alarm. He started mentally calculating how long Kent was going to go on about this.

Clark, obviously sensing his disinterest in this line of conversation, leaned forward on the desk to show that he was oh so serious. "Bruce. I know that you insist on having your methods, and I've given up fighting you on those. But you _cannot_ stalk your ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend."

Bruce resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Please. That's hardly stalking."

"You have a list of everything the poor man's eaten for a week straight." Clark pulled out the offending list from the middle of the file. "He seems like a perfectly nice person. And whether or not he knows that Diana is Wonder Woman, he certainly didn't sign up for _you_."

"Its important information." Bruce tried to grab the folder, and Clark whisked it away at superspeed. "By your definition, I stalk everyone."

It took Clark a moment to absorb the implications of that statement. He very slowly crossed his arms, as if to keep himself from doing anything rash. "Please, please, please tell me that you don't have files like this on my girlfriends."

"No. I don't need to. The only girls you've dated are Lana and Lois. I almost got engaged to Lois and have interacted just plenty with Lana, so I don't need anything more on them." Bruce stopped and considered that. "I guess you could say that you dated Maxima as well, but you said—and I quote—'I just want to take six showers and forget that ever happened.' So I didn't count her."

"I dated Lori Lemaris!" Clark didn't know why he was trying to debate dating experience with a guy who had probably done every eligible bachelorette in Gotham, but Bruce said it so dismissively that he just had to protest.

"The mermaid? She doesn't count."

"Why not? We went on dates. Ma made her apple pie." Clark said it as if that was the mark of a true romance.

"For one," Bruce replied, "I don't think the sex would have gone very well."

"_Bruce!_"

"She was a _fish_, Clark."

This time, it took Clark a good twenty seconds to fold his hands back together and let his shoulders relax, which was how Bruce knew that he had successfully found Clark's last nerve. But seeing as how he didn't have anything else to do (and this godforsaken monitor duty shift still had another forty-five minutes left to go) he stopped poking at it for the moment and let Clark continue.

"Let's approach this from another direction." Here was Clark Kent the Reporter, using his calming, almost therapist-like voice to pry out information. Or, in Bruce's case, any sort of appropriate emotion whatsoever in response to the situation at hand. "What would you say if I started a file on all of your past romances?"

"I'd say that would be an unimaginable amount of work, even for an investigative reporter with superspeed." He hit a couple keys, opening the list of mission reports. No new ones had been sent in for review. "I'll give you a break, though—the story about the blond triplets and the hair curler is just a rumor."

Clark tried to hide the disapproving look and wasn't entirely successful. "Fine. How do you think that _Diana_ would see this? Because I think that if she found that file she'd break both your legs."

Bruce conceded the point by not trying to snatch back the folder again. He wasn't ready to let the whole argument go, though. "I was checking to make sure that he wasn't a security risk or a supervillain or an imposter. You're the one who keeps telling me that we're supposed to look out for our teammates."

"Yes, Colonel Steve Trevor of the US Army Air Force appears to be _such _a security threat." Clark pointed to the page that listed Trevor's accomplishments, from heroic acts in wartime to charitable work overseas. It was quite an impressive list. Though not quite as impressive, Bruce thought, as saving the world a dozen times over. "You and I both know that Diana is more than capable of sniffing out a jackal. Why would she stay with him for six weeks if she thought something was off?"

Bruce sighed at the computer like that one should be obvious. "People do odd things when they think they're in love, Clark."

"Like stalking their ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend?" Clark asked. And there they were, at the meat of it.

"I'm not in love with Diana. You are overly romantic, and prone to imaging me as a person who has time for a love life."

"So love isn't why you filled up Gotham's emergency rooms with crooks with broken bones for a week after she broke up with you?"

Bruce twined his fingers together and rested his elbows on the desk, examining a satellite image of Earth for any hint of trouble. "How is that different from any other week?"

It was Clark's turn to concede the point, and he let Bruce put a hand on the file and slide it back towards his end of the desk. "From what I heard, even Gordon told you to take it down a notch. And the day _Gordon_ tells you to go easier on criminals is an extreme day, to say the least."

"You need to stop calling Alfred," Bruce said. "And he needs to stop taking your calls."

"It was Tim, actually." Clark leaned back in his chair, and checked the clock on the wall. Was this progress yet? Bruce hadn't told him to get out yet, so that was a slim improvement over some of their other conversations of this nature. "I bribed him with a chocolate bar. It must be hard to train an eight-year-old to keep secrets."

"I'll work on that."

"He's a cute kid; don't mess him up just yet." Clark thought that he caught something of a smile at that, which made him jump in feet first. "Diana's a great girl. If you love her, you shouldn't let her go so easily."

Bruce's hands paused on the keyboard, halfway through typing a sentence, and for an instant Clark thought he was going to get yelled at. But instead, Bruce just sighed again and went on typing. "I don't think you get it, Clark. I don't have anything for her."

"What do you mean by _that_?" Clark asked, rather sharply, before he could stop himself.

It took Bruce a moment to respond. "I mean—you overestimate me."

When Clark didn't show any sign of having understood him, he continued. "You think that because you have the relationship that you do with Lois that I should be able to have the same thing. But you can go through a building to stop Luthor, and it takes me days of detective work to figure out where the Joker is. I just can't provide a relationship for her, and by all accounts—"

He grimaced, like he didn't want to admit the next part. "—By all accounts, Trevor is a good man. Of course I _want_ her, Clark, but I can't take her. Now please, just put this file back in my desk and stop trying to set up a fantasy."

Clark pulled the file back and held it for a minute like he really was going to stand up and walk out. Instead, he set it in his lap and opened it to a photo of Diana in mid-air, bracelets flashing in the sunlight, grimy from battle but still radiant. They both knew that the picture had no informational value. Clark watched Bruce try to come up for a defense for it, some probable and non-emotional reason why it would be in the file, and why the edges would be crinkled like he'd turned back to it enough times to wear them down.

Finally, Bruce just reached over and shut the folder with one hand. "If you're trying to make us both happy, then let it go. She gets to have the white picket fence that she wants and I get to do what I do without trying to make a compromise that ends badly at both sides. She wants a magazine-worthy marriage and kids whose extracurriculars don't include masks. It's not that I don't _want_ her, Clark, but I can't have her."

Then he turned back to the monitor, and quite pointedly started working on cataloging mission reports. It was a stupid job, busy work, and ordinarily he would have given it to Wally or Kara as a punishment. But he needed something to do with his hands while he avoided Clark's soft-eyed look.

"I might have an unrealistic idea of you and her," Clark said, after what must have been five full minutes of silence, "but she doesn't. She loves you, and she knew that you could give her more than you did. And so—" he punctuated this with a finger in Bruce's direction. "—do you."

Bruce stopped typing, closed the file, and turned to Clark with the sort of thin expression that said that he was done with this. "You have ten seconds before I pull out the kryptonite. I suggest you use them to walk away."

Clark kept a protective hand over the file, but his eyes still darted towards the lead-lined pocket of Bruce's utility belt. "All I'm saying is this—I think even the grand and mighty Batman could spare a few evenings to take his girlfriend to dinner. Or ask her to run patrol with him once in a blue moon. You and I and Diana are all very aware that you did not give her as much as you could have."

Bruce didn't start typing again, but his hand didn't move towards the kryptonite either.

"You could have her back," Clark said, softly. "If you want her. She doesn't need you to give up the cowl or stop going out a night or turn the Cave into a nursery. She just wants to be treated like you love her. Just…think about it, yeah?"

He stood up then, because Bruce still hadn't resumed activity and this was a dangerous game he was playing as it was. He left the file on the desk, figuring that he'd already tempted the wrath of Batman enough.

"Burn it."

Clark was almost at the door. "What?"

"Burn it." Bruce didn't turn away from the monitor. "That's what you want, right?"

He pulled the file off the desk, spun his chair so that he was facing Clark, and held out the file. Clark crossed back across the room and took it. "You don't have copies anywhere? The negatives? It would undo quite a bite if Diana found more of those impressively detailed notes on her schedule."

"I didn't say I was going to talk with Di." Bruce said it in the same serious tone, but he didn't toss Clark a warning look or even wrinkle his eyebrows.

"Bring her chocolates." Clark didn't need to check that everything was still in the file—he could tell just by hefting it that it was complete. "Or roses, at the very least."

That earned him a barked chuckle from Bruce. "Always the romantic?"

"Always the romantic." Clark grinned, dumped the file into the bin by the door, and set it alight with a burst of heat vision. The pictures smelled like plastic and acetone while they melted into a puddle at the bottom of the metal can. "You might want to try it on sometime."

It was only through the closing door that he heard Bruce mutter at the computer, almost cheerily (_almost_ because Batman could never be accused of cheeriness), "I just might."


End file.
